> Another concrete example: exceptions vs. algebraic return types (Expect/Result/Maybe/etc.). People love the latter for code locality, and mostly ignore the ridiculous amount of noise this method adds to all code, and/or invent ever more advanced math to paper over it. Exceptions were much better in this regard, if worse in others, but again, I posit that having to make that choice is dumb in the first place.

There's actually at least one programming language that allows you to choose as needed, and it's Visual Basic of all things.

The "On Error Goto" directive says on error you want to jump to an exception handler. "On Error Resume Next" means just keep forging ahead -- which is a terrible idea done badly, but if check the Err object, you can access the status.

It's not quite as good as algebraic return types, but it was an interesting idea in that you can code each bit of code in whichever way works out best.